Present day agricultural balers pick up crop material, such as straw or hay, from a windrow or swath lying on the ground, deposit it in an infeed housing where it is conveyed across a feed table by a feeding mechanism through an inlet to a bale forming chamber. In the bale forming chamber the crop material is compressed by a reciprocating plunger to form a bale that is automatically tied by a tying mechanism before being discharged through the rear of the baler onto the ground or into a trailing wagon.
Exemplary of feeder mechanisms used in the above described type baler is the feeder disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,450,082, issued Sep. 28, 1948. In this early baler a rotating auger is employed to move crop material from the pickup to the bale forming chamber.
In other feeding mechanisms known in the art, the same general result is achieved by varying arrangements of feed fingers moving the crop material from the pick up to the bale forming chamber, such as illustrated by the apparatus disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,115,823, issued Dec. 31, 1963. Other well known feed mechanisms of the same general type are illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,724,363, issued Apr. 8, 1973 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,570,395, issued Mar. 16, 1971.
One particular prior art baler feeder utilizes a series of similar side-by-side rotary feeders in combination with a packer fork mechanism that act together to convey crop material into the baling chamber, e.g., see U.S. Pat. No. 4,488,366, issued Dec. 18, 1984. It is this general type of feeder is one type of arrangement, i.e., a series of similar rotating feeder mechanisms, for which the instant invention provides an improvement.
While the performance of all the aforementioned feeders is generally satisfactory, the requirements and demands of farmers are increasing with the need to optimize that performance to yield uniformly dense bales with consistent rectangular shape. This enhanced density and shape improves the handling of bales and obviates their tendency to disintegrate.
It is not uncommon to obtain poor bale shape caused by feed mechanisms that do not deliver crop far enough into the bale case, i.e., the hay receiving portion of the bale forming chamber. In many instances large quantities of material are deposited at the transition between the feed chamber and the bale case. During operation the plunger travels rearwardly past the feed opening whereupon a knife carried on the plunger cooperates with a fixed knife on the rear edge of the feed opening to shear such crop material left in the transition area. In situations of this nature the crop material left behind is fed over into the bale case with the next slug of material during the next working stroke of the packer resulting in a socalled "shingling" or "saw-tooth" effect on the side of the bale opposite the knife. This problem is more prevalent when baling grass hay ultimately causing the bale to have non-uniform density and irregular shape.